Techno Bubble Explodes

Ed Says 'Excuse Me!'

Paris:- Monday, 24. May 1999:- Some mysterious
thing went 'pop' in the night, possibly over
Saturday-Sunday, and Metropole went off the Internet for
the first time I can remember since February 1996.

There have been other incidents when parts of the
Internet have broken down and access has been disrupted to
or from some parts of the world, but this incident is the
first that I can remember that put Metropole into a flat
out 'off-the-air' situation.

I almost feel like getting on the phone and calling
everybody who tunes in on Mondays, to tell you not to
bother. Luckily for all of us, I know very few phone
numbers.

What is similar to the other times when there were
disruptions, is that it has happened on a long holiday
weekend - when it is impossible to get anything fixed.
There is just nobody around with a screwdriver.

I received an alert yesterday from Metropole's
server-lady, Linda Thalman - and, though it may be bad luck
to say so, it has kind of saved my neck.

A couple of weeks ago, I 'changed' the type characters
for the magazine's bodytext. Some of you will not have
noticed, because you have your browsers set to your own
preferences - or the browsers will simply show you what
they feel like anyhow.

Other readers did notice the typo changes, and wrote to
say so, positively. This encouragement helped me decide to
change the fonts for the headlines, to something looking a
bit more 'headline-like.'

You all know the old rule, "If it ain't broke, don't fix
it.' When I got the call about Metropole being offline -
and the impossibility of putting this
issue online on time - my 'fixing' was already costing me
secundos, minutos, horas, dias, mesas, años - of
time, spent fooling with the idiot code that lurks behind
all these pages.

The new headline type showed on some pages, but not
others. The tiny signature image I did for the Email pages
was floating around like a loose balloon - three hours were
spent hacking on that alone - just to place an 'image' that
took me 90 seconds to write. I arrived at a solution, one I
am still unhappy with because it looks like band-aid
code.

For the reluctant headlines, the 'fix' was relatively
simple. I threw away the code that didn't work, and copied
and pasted in seemingly identical code, that did work. Does
work.

Back to our techno-bubble burst, explosion, meltdown.
When Paris newspapers don't appear because of whatever
reason, the next day's edition usually has a little box on
the front page saying something like, "Due to an
Inkwell-Fillers strike yesterday, certain of our editions
did not appear. We are sorry about this because we had some
neat news ready for you, and the advertisers are hounding
us for their money back."

Metropole was not on strike. It was broken.

Any
Hackers Out There?

This reminds me - you may be able to help out here. I am
one of the ten-percent minority of lunatic-fringe Macintosh
users, and this is what is used for Metropole's
production.

The people who make browsers and the people who dreamed
up the code for Web pages obviously thought typography was
of no importance, because they seem to be unaware that type
fonts have names.

If I go to the trouble of selecting the fonts for
Metropole - by name - I do it so the pages will load faster
and will be easier to read when displayed. As a long-time
European resident, I do not care for serif-fonts in
small type sizes for reading on-screen. The little 'feet'
of these fonts are blurs at best.

If you have your browser set to 'Times Roman' that is
your choice and I can't do anything about it anyway. If you
have the size set to anything larger or smaller than
'default' - what a choice! - you will definitely not get
'what I see.' If you have a PC, and use Microsoft's browser
- somewhat probable - my whole page layout and typography
scheme becomes very dubious indeed.

So let's forget minor things like layout and body type.
The only thing we may see remotely in common, are the
headlines. When I am in the mood I try to make these - er,
- I work on these a bit - always dreaming of the chance I
missed to work on tabloid headlines, in ten-inch type.